[BAKUGO — WESTERN FOREST SECTOR]
The blade came out of the dark at the height of his face and he was already moving left because he'd heard the teeth first.
Moonfish. The name wasn't in his head as a name — it was in his head as blade-tooth villain, mid-range, extends from the mouth, distance management is the relevant variable. He'd filed it on the bus two weeks ago when Aizawa had given the villain profile briefing without giving any rationale for why first-years needed villain profiles during a training camp.
He blasted right and came around behind the nearest tree trunk wide enough to interrupt the extension range.
"I see you," Moonfish said. The voice had the quality of someone whose mouth was always occupied with something that made speech a secondary function. "You look tasty."
Bakugo pointed an explosion at the forest floor and let it carry him up into the lower canopy.
Todoroki was at his nine o'clock — he'd come from the northern side of the clearing, which meant they'd both been tracking the same source of sound and had arrived at the problem from different directions, which was the kind of accidental coordination that worked when both people were competent. Moonfish's blades extended upward toward the canopy and a secondary extension came from the lateral, and Bakugo blasted the lateral extension at its base — it shattered, the bone material fragmenting, and Moonfish made a sound that communicated this was information rather than pain.
Ice came from Todoroki's position — not a sweep, a containment. A column that rose at Moonfish's feet and climbed his legs and got three feet up before the blade extension shattered it, but the ice had bought two seconds and two seconds in a fight like this was a different country.
They did it again. And again.
Bakugo's explosions were the light source in this sector and they were keeping Dark Shadow from escalating — he could see Fumikage at the edge of the clearing, the shadow-creature surging against its own limit, the darkness and the night feeding it in ways that made it want to be bigger than it was. Bakugo's fire kept it from reaching that. He knew this without being told and kept the explosions coming.
Moonfish went down on the fourth containment attempt. The ice had gotten high enough and stayed long enough, and the combined light pressure from Bakugo's sustained explosions had disrupted the extension mechanism at the biological level — whatever controlled the bone growth didn't like the thermal interference. He hit the ground in the ice and didn't move.
Four minutes and change.
"Where's—" Todoroki started.
An explosion from the northern forest. Not his.
The explosion was distance-attenuated but still significant — the specific quality of an AP-shot level blast at a hundred meters or more, which was Bakugo's ceiling and also someone else's baseline.
Dark Shadow surged in the moment Bakugo's attention left the immediate area and his explosions dropped in frequency — the creature went from contained to expanding in three seconds, and the expansion had the quality of something that had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Kacchan!" Fumikage's voice, strained.
He turned back and his explosions came back and they were too late to prevent the first sweep — Dark Shadow's arm cleared the western clearing in a broad arc that would have removed Bakugo if he hadn't already been two meters above the ground on blast trajectory, the arc passing below him, and then Todoroki's fire came from the left and the fire was both sides and it was at the intensity of the Sports Festival sustained, and the light hit Dark Shadow's expanded form and the expansion stopped.
Three seconds of sustained fire while Fumikage wrestled the thing back into compliance. Three seconds where Bakugo watched Todoroki run both his quirks at the level that had still been new at the Sports Festival and was now — less new, more integrated, the technique of someone who had spent two months learning what he'd just discovered he had.
Dark Shadow retreated into Fumikage's shadow and Fumikage collapsed to one knee.
"I'm fine," Fumikage said, before anyone asked.
Bakugo checked the northern direction. The explosion had been followed by nothing — which was the wrong silence for a combat situation, the silence of a fight that had ended rather than paused.
His phone was out and the class communication channel had twelve messages, all of them in the cluster of the last three minutes.
Koda — northern sector — injured — someone just—
The message cut off.
He was already moving north.
[MOMO — CAMP COMMUNICATION TENT]
The tent had three screens, one chair, and two communication devices that she'd built and one that was standard UA issue. She'd been in the chair since the gas dispersal began and she had not moved from it except to retrieve the backup power unit from her bag.
Aizawa's channel: active, functional, intermittent. He was fighting in the eastern sector against an unidentified villain whose ability had disrupted his capture weapon's hardening mechanism — she'd heard this in his terse mid-combat communications and filed it.
Mandalay's channel: active, broadcasting student positions as they updated, the camp's central count showing eighteen of twenty expected students accounted for on the return-to-camp directive with two outstanding.
The third channel was red.
She'd built the transmitter for this specific event — for Yami's specific approach to situations that involved his specific kind of risk — and the building of it had been the acknowledgment that she understood what his approach was without requiring him to say it directly. She understood it now the way she understood the fragment mechanics and the killer-origin pattern and the thing she hadn't said to anyone because he hadn't asked her to say it to anyone: that the powers he carried had been purchased with deaths that he'd chosen, and that the choice was ongoing, and that the camp was the next choice.
The choice had been made. The signal was red.
She filed this in the part of her mind that handled facts that were also other things, and kept working.
Aizawa's channel at 11:34: Compress confirmed in western sector moving east. Someone find Bakugo.
She keyed her relay. "Bakugo last logged position western sector with Todoroki, forty minutes ago. Moonfish engagement confirmed resolved."
Moving east, Aizawa repeated.
The direction of the camp was east of the western sector. The direction of the evacuation route was east.
She looked at the map she'd made of the camp's layout — the one she'd been updating with reported positions all night — and found Bakugo's last confirmed position and Compress's reported movement and drew the line between them.
The line arrived at the evacuation route.
At 11:41, she heard Kirishima through the ambient channel — not a clear transmission, the signal bleeding through from his device at a volume that meant he was not talking into his device, he was yelling in the open air — and what he was yelling was a name.
She looked at the two devices in her hands.
The transmitter in her right hand had Yami's stopped heart on it. Red.
The relay in her left hand had Kirishima's scream on it.
Both of them were failure. Both of them were things she had instruments for and could not change with the instruments she had.
She held them and did not put either one down.
[TODOROKI — CAMP PERIMETER, EASTERN APPROACH]
The explosion came from behind him. Then nothing.
He turned.
Bakugo had been twenty meters to his right on the evacuation route, which was the correct route for their position and the correct choice given the information they had. He'd been watching Fumikage, who needed someone watching him after the Dark Shadow surge, and the twenty meters between him and Bakugo had been twenty meters that contained nothing that required watching.
Then contained nothing.
He went to the position in four seconds. The undergrowth had the specific disturbance of recent activity — someone had been here and was not here, the air still carrying the chemical trace of a small explosion, the specific product of Bakugo's palms at close range. A defensive response. A response to contact.
The contact had already concluded.
He looked at the position. He looked at the evacuation route ahead. He looked at the forest to the north, which had been where the secondary explosion had come from earlier, the one that had distracted Bakugo's attention during the Dark Shadow surge.
Contact. Defensive response. Gone.
He ran to camp.
The dawn roll call at camp had the quality of a process that had been designed for ordinary outcomes and was being used for an extraordinary one. Aizawa called names. Nineteen names answered.
The twentieth name: silence.
The twenty-first name — the extra position, the one that wasn't on any official UA class roll, the one that Aizawa had started calling last because calling it produced the specific quality of a silence that was different from Bakugo's silence:
"Ichigo."
Silence.
But the different kind. Bakugo's silence was the silence of an absence that was permanent until it was resolved — the taken-away kind, the gone-and-needing-to-be-retrieved kind. Yami's silence was the silence the class had heard at the first post-USJ roll call, at the Seat 20 that had sat empty for twenty-three hours and then answered the next morning.
Eighteen hours remaining, by his standard cycle.
Todoroki was looking at the northern sector of the forest where the second explosion had come from. Kirishima had his fists at his sides with the specific quality of someone who was in the phase of response that came before the decision about which direction to move.
Momo was standing at the tent entrance. She had both devices — the red-light transmitter, the relay — still in opposite hands. She was looking at the treeline.
She looked at Aizawa.
"He's in the northern sector," she said. "I have his last position."
Aizawa looked at her for two seconds. Then at the transmitter in her hand.
"You were monitoring him," he said.
"Yes."
The pause that followed had the quality of a person adding a significant data point to a file he'd been building for nine months and deciding what question to ask next.
He chose no question. "Show me the coordinates," he said.
She did.
The class reassembled around the camp's central fire point in the grey quality of early morning — battered, some of them, gassed, most of them, the specific collective exhaustion of people who had been in high-stakes circumstances for eight hours and had come through with the inventory of what they'd had and lost. Fumikage sat with Dark Shadow reduced to a sliver. Kaminari had his arm in an improvised sling from something in the western sector. Uraraka had a cut above her eyebrow that someone had wrapped.
Two chairs empty. The math of the morning written in the spaces the chairs occupied.
Eighteen hours.
Kirishima sat in his chair with his jaw set at the specific angle it had at the Sports Festival after Yami had come back from the arena floor and at the USJ aftermath and every other occasion when the specific category of waiting for someone to come back had been the position he occupied. He'd gotten good at it. He hadn't gotten comfortable with it.
"He'll come back," Todoroki said.
Not loudly. To the table, or to himself, or to both.
Kirishima didn't answer. He was looking at the empty chair.
Eighteen hours.
And somewhere between those hours and the end of them, in a planning room in Kamino that had peeling walls and a whiteboard, a boy was a marble in someone's coat pocket — and that part of the morning's accounting didn't have a countdown timer.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]
To supporting Me in Pateron .
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
👉 Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!